War Stories
If you fall asleep, if it’s twelve of you and you all fall asleep, you’re dead meat.
Why did they need to keep you up at night?
To harass us, so we couldn’t sleep. There were occasions where they would just go outside in their village and fire their weapons a couple times, so we were ready for a firefight. Sometimes there was one and sometimes there wasn’t. I know one guy who didn’t go to sleep for the rest of the night! That’s me. That was part of my PTSD because I didn’t trust you to guard me while I was sleepin. I would make sure you were woke because he did come to attack.
I lost about five or six, I think six. I lost six of them to combat. That’s very, very emotional when that happens. My number one buddy, he got wasted. It’s different in the North. There you know what you’re in for there. In the South, you get off a helicopter in a village where they were supposed to be your allies, and the VC start firing at you from the hootches. He got a terrible stomach wound and they would not let the helicopter land. The guy that I was with every day of my tour. He died right there on the spot.
You mentioned that you didn’t know who the VC were, that they sold you Coca-Cola during the day. How does that affect you mentally? Knowing that your enemy is there and that they are talking to you, but you cant do anything about it?
I chose the substance abuse route at the time. I’m not saying this is what everyone did. I reached a level of comfort knowing that at the time that I was there, it was highly unlikely that we were going to get into a major conflict because the area I was in south of Saigon was totally open-no jungle. Pineapple orchards and rice paddies. You could see for miles and miles. Their strategy was to go undercover in the daytime and then in the night come out. We knew this, but I didn’t have the right to come up and say, “You look like you fit the profile of a VC.” And then waste him. I couldn’t do that. If you look at some of the cinema about Vietnam, you see a lot of that going on, and it really happened. The VC was a very cunning individual. He knew how to socialize in the daytime. He and she. And I can understand because the NVA and the communist party put a lot of pressure on these people. They said, “You’re going to be a VC or we are going to kill your grandmother, your grandfather and your kids.” Half of them were doing what they had to do. They had no choice. It was fight for the cause to unite South and North Vietnam or your family is gonna die.
When I went to Tet, that was one of the turning points of that Vietnam War in January 1968. I was still in country. The VC, they signed a cease-fire for 48 hours along with us and the South Vietnamese soldiers. We didn’t know what Charlie had planned. Saigon was one of the major targets, and that was my area. My unit, C Company 199th Light Infantry Brigade was the first unit to land in the Fu Tho race track. You’re talkin about dead bodies by the numbers. That was the only time, like in Iraq, where we went house to house lookin for the enemy in Saigon. 9 out of the 10 dead bodies, enemy wise weren’t really the enemy. 9 out of 10 of them were civilians! You know how traumatic that is to see kids and old people layin around because Charlie walked up and just took care of them. They raised hell that month.